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Meet CHARLI

BLACKSBURG, Va., June 2, 2010—Virginia Tech robotics professor Dennis Hong and many of his robots, including the human-sized robot CHARLI, will appear at this week’s World Science Festival, held in New York City. The festival is annual event designed to take “science out of the laboratory and into the streets, theaters, museum and public halls of New York, making the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating,” according to the group’s website.

CHARLI is a 5-foot tall humanoid robot and is one of many autonomous robots built by Dennis Hong and his students at the Virginia Tech College of Engineering’s Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa). The students built CHARLI L with $20,000 in seed money from the Virginia Tech Student Engineers’ Council and donated equipment from National Instruments and Maxon Precision Motors. Some of his older brothers and sisters and gadgets include:

* DARwIn: A fourth-generation autonomous, humanoid robot best known internationally as a RoboCup star;
* RAPHaEL: A robotic hand with possible military applications, operated by a compressed air tank;
* STriDER: A three-legged walking machine that improves on a classic “War of the Worlds” concept, but with peace in mind; and
* IMPASS: An autonomous high-mobility locomotion platform that can mount nearly any surface, no matter the terrain, using retractable spokes.

A look at the thought process of Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Professor Dennis Hong, one of Popular Sciences Brilliant 10 of 2009 (See robots at: http://www.me.vt.edu/romela/RoMeLa/Ro and D…irector of the award-winning Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa).